Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Market Institutions in Russia

Preface

Preface Creating institutions to support a stable social order is a findamental problem that has concerned philosophers and social scientists for centuries. Absent reliable third-party enforcement by the state, individual incentives to cheat on agreements are too tempting to ignore and lead to perverse results for society. This problem ofsocial order prompts the main question of the book: Under what conditions can private groups govern themselves without turning to the state for enforcement? This work examines the problem of social order on the micro level in postcommunist Russia. Many have documented Russia's attempt to create a stable social order, but few have analyzed a prior issue: the ability of the Russian state-or any other organization-to create institutions that provide public goods that make social order possible. We typically view the state as an organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a given territory, but the Russian state exercises only a tenuous claim to this monopoly . In response to the weakness ofthe Russian state, brokers and bureaucrats in postcommunist Russia have sought to build institutions between the state and the market that allow businesspeople to trade with some confidence that contracts will be honored. This work seeks to explain why some efforts to create institutions to support self-governance and create social order on markets in Russia succeeded, while others failed. It develops a political theory of selfgovernance to account for this puzzle. Institutions are central to economic growth, democratic governance and the creation of a stable social order. Despite the importance of institutions, we still have much to learn about their creation and performance. This work aims to enrich our understanding of this important topic. Throughout the book I use the Library of Congress system of transliteration from English into Russian. I bow to convention for words that already have a standard English-language version, such as Yeltsin or Yakovlev. Unless otherwise stated, the Russian translations are my own. ...